Archive for December, 2014


The end of the year is near. It’s time to look back in 2014. Looking back every year, a tradition I started in 2005. Now 2014 is coming to an end, what has happened this year?

One of the things that 2014 has brought is Beginhoven, my urban farming association, has obtained a lot from the municipality. So, in 2014, we have taken our first steps in actually growing some vegetables. The lot needs some work before it can produce food, and wild rabbits are eating our plants. However, we had some harvest nevertheless. We’re working on a toad pool and a storage hut. Beginhoven, urban farming, it’s an awesome project, but what I think is the most important thing about the project is the people, my friends, working together to archive a common goal. I am blessed to have friends like this. Something I have realised the past year on more then one occasion. Thank you everyone <3.

Apart from Beginhoven, 2014 has also meant the end of me being a student. A few weeks ago I’ve received my master’s degree. Working on my thesis project, well, scientific writing is tough, that I can tell you. Writing the code to do what they want, well, that’s rather straight forwards, but writing a thesis report about it, a whole different story.

In 2014 I’ve also met some amazing new friends, both in real life and online, inspiring people, beautiful souls. Ah… got to love festival season, right ;)

So… now I have arrived at the end of 2014, and at the end of a phase in my life. I am no longer a student. So…. I have arrived at a crossroad. Where to go from here? What road to take? What will the future bring? The future, a story yet untold. Where will I be next year? At this point, there is no way of telling. I welcome the unknown.

Happy 2015,
Love ya all <3

So, I was trying to compile an ancient Delphi 7 project in Lazarus. After running the import Delphi project wizard, and attempting to compile. After removing some Windows specific code (Windows version detection in OSinfo.pas has no meaning when compiling for Linux) ran into an error saying

Can't find unit exeinfo used by lnfodwrf

This error seems to be caused by the presence of a unit in my Delphi 7 project having a name clash with a Lazarus RTL unit, strings.pas. After renaming the unit, the problem went away. Now there is some other problem about a missing using TTcpClient. Oh well….

So, it’s Christmas Eve… time to write my Christmas Blog Post.So, tomorrow it’s Christmas, and what is it all about…

Christmas… a commercial event, tons of presents, a Christmas dinner big enough to feast for a week, is that what Christmas is really about?

Christmas is supposed to be about peace. Peace can only be archived by forgiveness. Forgive others who did you
wrong. Forgive the people who have hurt you. Sometimes they don’t even realise they’re hurting you, simply
because they experience the world differently, because they just can’t understand how you think and feel.
And sometimes, people have been hurt so badly they can’t act differently. So forgive them.

Forgive yourself for all the stupid things you did. Forgive yourself for the times you’ve hurt others. Forgiveness is the key to peace. It’s the only way.

My wishes for Christmas is that everyone can be happy, really, that’s all I wish for, all of you to be happy.

Merry Christmas,
Vrolijk Kerstfeest,
Frohe Weihnachten
God Jul!

So, I am working on this project. It’s written in Java and it consists on several web services (tomcat servlets) interacting. For the client part I am using Jersey. I have been writing a couple of servlets, and they’ve been interacting just fine, until yesterday, I ran into a problem.

The code to make a POST requests consist of the following form:

String myURL="http://localhost:8080/SomeService/someFunction";
UriBuilder uriBuilder = UriBuilder.fromUri(myURL);
FormDataMultiPart form = new FormDataMultiPart();

form.field("Field1", Field1);
form.field("Field2", Field2);

URI location = uriBuilder.build();
WebResource webResource = Client.create().resource(location);
String response= webResource.type(MediaType.MULTIPART_FORM_DATA)
.post(String.class,form);

Code written this form has been working fine until yesterday. Until this happened


SEVERE: Servlet.service() for servlet [SomeServlet] in context with path [/someFunction] threw exception
com.sun.jersey.api.client.ClientHandlerException: javax.ws.rs.WebApplicationException: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Missing body part entity of type 'text/plain'

raised by webResource.type(MediaType.MULTIPART_FORM_DATA).post(String.class,form);/

Google wasn’t very helpful solving this issue. The problem: one of the fields had a null value. So basically, this is a NullPointerException. If it said so, I knew what to look for, but… looking at this message, I hadn’t a clue what to look for. I was more-or-less expecting this meant the servlet being called returned nothing. But, after some debugging, including sniffing packets using WireShark, I had to make the conclusion no request was attempted. From there, I started thinking back about my changes. I realised on the the last steps I made was adding more fields to the request. So, I uncommented the fields I’ve added, and it made the (incomplete) request just fine. From there, I realised the issue must be with the newly added fields. That’s how I found out what the problem really was about.